Teju Cole on Death and Music

I spent the Diwali Sunday at a friend’s place and finished Teju Cole’s Tremor (between the conversations). Cole, who was a sensation in Twitter with his micro fiction – until he decided to quit the platform – in his latest book brings in the familiar and exhausting immigrant analysis of art, culture and history. A few of his musings on death and music appreciation stood out though:

We are in the time now when we cannot think of those who were born in the early 1930s without thinking they are soon to die. So many of them have died already. By straightforward logic, in a decade from now all those born in the early 1940s will be doomed. Twenty years from now to have been born in the 1950s will be to belong to the generation that is dying off. The 1960s. The 1970s. The 1980s will be for someone else what the 1930s are for us now: the mark of imminent farewell. The generations go completely, the few long-lived holdouts don’t hold out for much longer than the rest. Death’s combine harvester is the most thorough of machines. And yet, for now, in this hospital waiting room, in my forties and full of worry about a friend in her sixties, my aliveness is as total as my extinction someday will be. I am as quietly incredulous as those young kamikaze pilots in the final months of the war, those young captains and lieutenants who, having to imagine the unimaginable, wrote final letters that were delivered after their deaths. Take care of Mother, she now has no one else but you. I am sorry to be leaving you at such a time. Forgive me for causing you sorrow in your twilight years. In the future you might come to understand that I have done my duty.

THERE ARE TIMES LISTENING to music on the radio or by streaming when he is tempted to identify what he is hearing by looking up the track name. He resists the impulse and does something else: he turns up the volume or lowers it. The main thing in such moments is to reorient his attention and remove any extramusical information, anything that might get in the way of his direct contact with the music, and focus instead on the immediate experience. Everyone arrives at knowledge of the world from a personal point of view and is not the poorer for it. Each person understands life on the basis of small personal events. Firsthand experience is what matters. It is by being grounded in what we know and what we have experienced that we can move out into greater complexities. When possible he wants to listen and receive the music in his body before he gives it a name. He has noticed that when he attempts to put the experience of this music into words his words are received as categories: the category of music as entertainment, the category of anthropological interest, the category of good taste, the category of unusual taste, the category of racial solidarity, the category of being a stranger in someone else’s home. He wants to say no to all this, that he means to convey experience not categories but he can never seem to find the words of the right accuracy or sufficient intensity. But why should he wish to translate to others the thought that something untranslatable is happening to him? Let the untranslatable remain untranslatable. Let the thing that makes him feel less alone remain one of the things in which he feels most alone.

An apt description of my own reluctance to share the music I enjoy…